Eleven young survivors were also riots' victims

Even now, no one in the Spellman family can seem to agree. Was it Dee Dee at the window or Sharon? Or was it Kimberly? With 11 kids, it can be hard keep track.

Suffice it to say, one of the Spellman children was looking out the open window of the family's apartment in the Hayes Homes public housing high-rises about 6 o'clock in the evening 40 years ago today, July 15, 1967.

Ten stories below, three days of rioting had turned Newark upside down, with tanks rumbling through the streets, checkpoints at every intersection and armed soldiers firing at any shadow they thought might turn into a sniper.

And all Eloise Spellman was trying to do was make dinner.

She was a seamstress who worked in a local sweat shop, a sweet-natured woman who made her own clothes and cooked a mean stew. And when she saw one of her children too close to the window, too close to all the danger below, she scurried over to shoo the child away.

But in leaning out to shut the window -- which opened away from the sill -- her upper torso was momentarily exposed.

From somewhere below, someone with a uniform and a gun who saw a head peaking out of that 10th-floor window, mistook a 42-year-old mother of 11 for a sniper, and opened fire.

Witnesses later testified to a grand jury the gunfire came from State Troopers and National Guardsmen stationed at the No. 6 firehouse on the other side of Springfield Avenue.

"We were firing at that building all the time," Craig Mierop, who was stationed at the firehouse, said in a recent interview.

"After this one unbelievable volley, I took the binoculars to take a closer look. It looked like something from Normandy."

Who fired the fatal bullet remains unknown. What the bullet did, according to a later autopsy report, was pierce Eloise Spellman's neck and perfectly sever her carotid artery, the main vessel between the heart and the brain.

Eloise fell back on the couch and began soaking the pillows with her blood as bullets continued to hammer the apartment.

"I just remember people yelling, 'Get down,'" said Pam Spellman, who was 8 at the time. "We were just little kids and we were so scared."

The Spellmans had no phone, so a neighbor called an ambulance. But with all the chaos, the ambulance couldn't make it in time.

"My mother bled to death on the couch waiting for that ambulance to come," said Crystal Spellman, who was 7 back then. "The last thing she said before she died was, 'Take care of my children.'"

FAMILY SPLIT APART
Taking care of the Spellman children was no simple task.

They were 11 kids, ages 6 months to 19 years, with five different fathers and one dead mother, living in one of the worst projects in one of the nation's poorest cities.

While Brenda, Bruce and Sharon, all in their late teens, were left on their own, the rest of the children were quickly parceled out.

Richard, Dee Dee, Pam and Crystal were sent to live with their mother's cousin. Frank, Carl, Kimberly and Mike went to a foster care placement in New York.

The children had an odd kind of celebrity at first. Of the 26 people who died in the riots, Eloise Spellman was the quintessential innocent victim, a mother who took a bullet trying to protect one of her children.

There was an outpouring of sympathy. The city paid for her funeral. Gerber sent boxes of baby food for little Mikey. Prudential made sure the children got something for Christmas, and their picture with Santa Claus appeared in the Newark Evening News.

And then ... nothing.

Their mother was occasionally mentioned in articles about the riots -- after John W. Smith, the cab driver whose beating by police sparked the disorders, Eloise Spellman always made for good copy -- but the fate of her 11 orphans was not even a footnote.

The three oldest stayed on their own. The middle four bounced from one family member to the next. The four youngest were removed from one foster home after it was found to be abusive and were given other placements.

Through the years, the children fared like Newark itself: Some thrived, some struggled.

And five died -- all well before their time.

It turns out, taking care of the Spellman children is something no one has been able to do for 40 years now.

"If my mother had not died the way she did, I'm sure they would all be alive today," said Brenda Spellman, the oldest. "The riot is what killed them. It killed them mentally long before it finally killed them physically."

HE WAS 'THE GLUE'
The first to pass, and the only one to die of natural causes, was Richard.

He wasn't the oldest number four but he acted like the oldest: Always organizing family functions, driving the younger kids to see the older kids, keeping them together.

"Richard was the glue," Crystal said. "No matter how disconnected we were to each other, we all felt close to Richard."

In a 1972 interview with the Star-Ledger, Richard said he had let go of the bitterness he felt toward whoever had taken his mother's life.

He dedicated himself instead to his family and his career, working his way through an undergraduate degree at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) and a master's degree in business administration at Rutgers. He taught business classes at Essex County College and worked as a construction contract administrator.

There was only one thing he couldn't will himself through: pancreatic cancer. He beat it once. Then it spread to his liver. He died on Nov. 11, 1987, at age 35.

"It would have been easy for him to wallow in what happened to his mother," said Kathy Spellman, his widow. "He just didn't let the badness and sadness overtake him.

"Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he hadn't gotten sick, if he would have been able to hold his family together more," Kathy said. "After Richard died, it just seemed like that whole family went into free fall."

NUMBING THE PAIN
Sharon and Doreen -- who everyone called Dee Dee -- were next.

Sharon, the third oldest, was the most beautiful of Eloise Spellman's 11 children. "She was a gorgeous little thing," remembered Neal Patterson, a retired Newark policeman and a family friend. That, her siblings said, was part of her problem. From the time she was young, her looks made it easy to slip in with a fast crowd.

Heroin was her drug. And even as her looks faded, she could always find a way to score more whether it was charming some guy or stealing from her family.

"If you left her to watch your children, you might not have any furniture when you came back," Crystal said.

She slowly wasted away, consumed by drugs and diseases acquired from needles, until she died on Feb. 21, 1990.

For Dee Dee, the fifth-oldest, the drug was alcohol.

In same ways, Dee Dee was a functional drunk: She kept an immaculate house, held down a variety of jobs, maintained appearances as she raised her five children in the same projects where her mother had been killed.

But her siblings knew better.

"When she found out she had incurable cirrhosis of the liver and was dying she said, 'When I die, bury me under a liquor store,'" Pam said. "Even in the hospital, she begged us to bring her drinks."

She died June 21, 1991.

"All of us felt the same pain as Sharon and Dee Dee," Crystal said. "They just made the choice to numb the pain. We were all tragedies. They were just the visible tragedies."

TWO OTHERS SUCCUMB
There were soon to be more: Next Carl, and then Mike.

Carl, the ninth-oldest, had been the quiet one. His family knew he had his limits you never pushed Carl too hard but he seemed happy. He had settled down and married Roxanne, a Guyanese immigrant, with whom he soon had a son.

He had a good-paying job at a factory in Bloomfield. He bought his first house.

Then he and Roxanne started having problems. She started talking about taking their son and moving back to Guyana alone.

That's when quiet Carl started acting strangely.

"At one point, he just started giving all his stuff away and emptying out his bank account," Crystal said. "I didn't realize what he was doing. I just thought it was nice of him to give me money."

One night, according to family members, he called his brother Bruce, saying he shot and killed his wife and was going to kill himself. Bruce raced to Carl's house, arriving in time to hear the fatal shot.

Carl had placed his wedding band on top of his suicide note.

"We've been through so many tragedies. I'm sorry for causing another one," it said. "I know what I've done is a coward's way out. But I couldn't find the pieces to mend my heart back together."

Mike Spellman, the 11th and youngest of Eloise Spellman's children, had his own heartache. He had no memory of his mother.

To make up for it, he took an intense interest in her death, going to the library to read books and documents that might mention her. He wrote poems and songs laced with bitterness and regret. He spoke at riot commemorations. He talked about suing the city.

"He thought everything bad that happened to us was the fault of the riot," Crystal said. "He was angry at the world."

There were other troubles in his life he went to jail for three years in the mid-1990s for sexually assaulting a young girl but he tried to turn himself around, opening a hair salon in East Orange called Kinkz the Nappy Spot.

Which is what made Sept. 10, 2002, so stunning to people who knew him. East Orange police said he fatally stabbed his girlfriend, fashion design student Estee Sawyerr, set her naked body on fire then jumped off the roof of his eight-floor apartment building.

Some of the Spellmans still don't believe he committed suicide. They even suspect foul play neighbors heard Mike arguing with a man earlier in the day. But other family members see it as part of a continuum that began four decades ago.

"It's a chain of events that started with my grandmother's death and just keeps on going," said Jasmine Spellman, Crystal's daughter. "We're not the only family in the world that's had problems. It just seems like ours never go away."

THE SURVIVORS
The surviving Spellman children have each coped differently.

Brenda, the oldest at 59, moved away. She worked for Verizon for 30 years and accepted transfers that took her far from New Jersey first Maryland, then South Carolina.

"After a certain point in time, it was just too much," said Brenda, now retired. "I had to get away."

Bruce, the second-oldest, at 58, moved to East Orange and is now retired from a job at Honeywell. He never talks about his mother -- not even when his son, Bruce Jr., asks about it -- and he declined to be interviewed for this story.

"That's a door I keep closed," he said.

Pam, the sixth-oldest, does her best to keep her mother's memory intact. A few years ago, on Mother's Day, she enlarged a picture of her mother in a long black gown to poster-size and hung it over her television. A security guard for the East Orange Board of Education, Pam said she looks at the picture whenever she needs strength.

"I'm 48. I'll be 49 in September. And I still need my mom," she said. "I still miss her."

Crystal, the seventh-oldest, also tries to keep her mother's memory alive. After raising her own children, Crystal went back to school. This April, at 47, she graduated from Rutgers-Newark with a degree in African-American studies. She is planning on grad school and, perhaps, writing a book about her family.

"If I was to ever write about this, it would be about the great pain inside," Crystal said. "I try to remember things about my mother other than that one day and I can't. I never had a family after that. I never trusted anyone after that. You have something like that happen to you when you're young, and you get brought up thinking there's nobody out there for you and you're on your own in this world."

Frank, the eighth child, lives in Union. Now 46, he works for the Town of Montclair Parks Department. "What happened to my mother is still emotional for me," he said. "I just try to move on as best I can."

The youngest surviving Spellman child is Kimberly, 44, who lives in Queens, N.Y., and works as a hairdresser. She said she still struggles with her mother's death and has been diagnosed as manic depressive. Once, many years ago, she decided to learn more about her mother.

"It was like it was a secret," Kimberly said. "No one would tell me anything about her."

She eventually found a copy of her mother's autopsy report.

It described Eloise Spellman as a "well nourished colored female" who stood 5 foot 7 and weighed 170 pounds. It reported she died of blood loss from the gunshot wound that entered the left side of her neck and exited through her upper right arm.

It also noted she had an enlarged uterus. Unbeknownst to any of her children, and perhaps even to Eloise herself, there was going be a 12th Spellman child.